This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org

Servlet spec - web.xml

From OWASP
Revision as of 17:16, 6 February 2012 by Dominique RIGHETTO (talk | contribs) (Page creation)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

Status

Released on (mm/dd/yyyy) : 02/06/2012

Description

JEE web specification provides a way to configure, declaratively in the web deployment descriptor ("web.xml" file), the web app. behavior when an exception occur in a web component.

Behavior can be configured to react on elements below to display a resource:

  • Java exception
  • HTTP response code

Possible configurations

Configuration below redirect user to page "/errorManagement.jsp" when an error occur.

Configuration to react on Java exception

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
	id="WebApp_ID" version="3.0">
	
	...
	
	<!-- Define error page to react on Java exception -->
	<error-page>
		<exception-type>java.lang.Throwable</exception-type>
		<location>/errorManagement.jsp</location>
	</error-page>
	
	...	
	
</web-app>

Configuration to react on HTTP response code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
	id="WebApp_ID" version="3.0">
	
	...
	
	<!-- Define error page to react on HTTP response code -->
	<error-page>
		<error-code>500</error-code>
		<location>/errorManagement.jsp</location>
	</error-page>
	
	...	
	
</web-app>


Content of the error management page

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<%@page import="java.util.logging.Logger"%>

<%@ page language="java" 
	contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
	pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1" 
	isErrorPage="true"%>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<title>Page to manage error</title>
</head>

<body>
	<%-- Log error on server side --%>
	<%
		//When the page attribute "isErrorPage" is set to "true" the exception object is available
		Logger.global.finest("Error : " + exception.getMessage());
	%>

	<%-- Display generic error to client --%>
	<b>An error occur !</b>
</body>
</html>

Best practice

In order to don't miss any server error, it's a best practice to define a java exception based error page and set exception type to "java.lang.Exception".